Doug Feigelson is a true entrepreneur, one who has built a successful business out of a custom solution he designed as part of another venture. He says hed rather "fail completely" than sell his company, and, as a third-year computer science student at MIT, he regularly turns down job offers so he can focus on his startup.

But he hates the word entrepreneurship. Its a title too many people adopt these days, he says, and it attracts too much unwanted attention. Hed rather be working than talking about his work.

The very worst startups, even if they have a good idea, they just dont work, Feigelson says. There are people who talk and talk and talk, and they dont work. Thats part of why I dont do a lot of interviews. Im always scared that Im going to spend more time talking about something than doing it.

Especially recently, the success of his startup has landed him in the spotlight at several MIT events focused on entrepreneurship.Between today and yesterday, Ill probably spend more time doing tangential things than actually working, he says.

Regardless of whether he likes the attention, Feigelson will have trouble escaping it. Hes the founder of Zinc, an API for ordering products from online retailers. Zincs origins date back to Feigelsons high school days, when he made good money exploiting price discrepancies on e-commerce sites. He would buy college text books on Amazon.com and sell them on eBay, where book sellers were over-charging college students. By under-cutting the high prices on eBay, Feigelson was able to steal some customers and turn a profit.

As demand grew, so did his frustrations. By his freshman year of college, Feigelson found himself spending too much time simply ordering books from Amazon to sustain the business he was attracting on eBay. When he couldnt find the solution to his problem elsewhere, Feigelson built it himself. Thats when he realized that he might benefit from refocusing his efforts.

From the very beginning when I made this, I was looking for an existing solution, and it always struck me how many people were looking for it as well, Feigelson says. So I thought there might be something there even three years ago. We were still running that other business, and we said theres a lot more opportunity doing this, so we should start to do that, and that was a couple years ago. And that was a lot of work, a huge amount of work.

Feigelson is glad to take on the extra work for a business that fits his model for a good startup.

I think the best startups are the ones that found a very specific problem that hurts a lot for people, and then they solve it, Feigelson says. And then people, even if theyre hesitant or it seems unfamiliar, theyre willing to embrace it because it fixed a pain point.Without actually establishing a working relationship with Amazon, Zinc has been able to simplify the ordering process down to just one call to the API. The customer only needs to set up an account with Zinc, add money to the account, and then set up Zincs API to order and ship the products they need. As long as they have the Amazon ID for the products they need to order and the addresses where they will be delivered, customers can set up recurring automatic orders.

Zincs customers have found the API useful for both convenience and cutting costs. Companies selling their products through multiple online channels are using Zinc to avoid missing out on sales when demand outstrips supply. Others have been able to reallocate their resources to more productive tasks.

A couple of our customers literally had people working full-time, one of them was full-time and another was just spending a lot of time, ordering things from Amazon, just a lot of clicking, Feigelson says. And with us they could automate that and just save all that effort.

However, Zinc hasnt been restricted to the B2B world. Feigelson says some of the more creative cases have been for individual use, where hackers apply the technology to interesting real-life purposes. In one example, Zinc could be set up to automatically order more ink when a printer runs low. In another, a developer inquired about using Zinc to create a Facebook app allowing people to set up small accounts with their own money, say $50, and inviting friends to buy him gifts with it. Another developer wanted to create an app that automatically orders a random object to be delivered to his house every month.

With at least another semester remaining at MIT, Feigelson has refrained from promoting Zinc too heavily. He turns down most media requests and hasnt participated in many startup conferences or competitions, save for the MIT 100K competition, where the company was a semifinalist. So far, most of Zincs customers have found the company organically, simply by searching API for ordering from Amazon on search engines.

Once the summer break provides some free time for Feigelson and Eric Swanson, Feigelsons high school friend and Zinc co-founder who currently lives in their native Ohio and attends the University of Cincinnati, the company plans to dive into its promotional stage. Feigelson says theyll pursue some relationships with other online retailers, like Walmart.com and Target.com, or will at least attempt to automate the process of ordering from their websites.

He plans to spend the summer working from San Francisco. Not to open an office the company will probably work full-time out of an apartment but just to be around the startup culture. Feigelson likes the environment, the coffee shops full of entrepreneurs talking about startups, in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area. But, even while running a successful startup in the startup cultures epicenter, he doesnt expect to be spending much time talking that way himself.

I usually like to say Im working on a project, he says. I usually prefer not to say the word startup.

Colin Neagle covers emerging technologies and the startup scene for Network World. Follow him on Twitter and keep up with the Microsoft, Cisco and Open Source community blogs. Colin's email address is cneagle@nww.com.

Slideshows

Google and Microsoft tackle triple value play at Synnex Alliance 2018

This Synnex Alliance roadshow, in association with Google and Microsoft, started with the end-user and worked back to define the notion of value, outlining the lucrative partner opportunities ahead in 2018.

Changing names: the top company rebrands hitting the channel

The past year has seen a flurry of acquisitions, sales, consolidations and business transformations in the local tech sector; ARN takes a look at the company name changes and rebrands across the Australian channel that have resulted from all this activity.

Upcoming tech talent share insights at Emerging Leaders 2018

The channel came together for the third running of the ARN Emerging Leaders Forum in Australia, created to provide a program that identifies, educates and showcases the upcoming talent of the ICT industry.

Copyright 2018 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.